After a 12-week online course, Brazilian-Kiwi Thiago Canestraro pulled off an impressive career change earlier this year – from asbestos removal to IT.
"I was destroying stuff, now I'm building stuff in the cloud", he tells Jesse Mulligan.
Thiago Canestraro Photo: Supplied
Canestraro says he's been curious about technology since childhood and always thought he'd enjoy working in that field.
'I was always thinking… you put dreams sometimes in the background. Sometimes you do what you need to do, you know, and pay the bills.'
Then this year, his good friend Eduardo – who'd been encouraging him into IT for a couple of years – sent him a link to a free course at Unitec.
Canestraro couldn't believe it was free, left his asbestos removal job and signed himself up.
That first step into the unknown took him a lot of courage, he says, and he questioned whether he'd made the right choice.
But at the end of the course – which involved a whole lot of reading, he says – Canestraro scored an internship with Spark.
When his month-long internship ended in March, Canestraro got an offer and a "warm welcome" to join the telecommunications company as an IT engineer
"I couldn't believe in a global pandemic you manage to change your career, change your life like this, we're such a blessed country."
Canestraro wasn't sure how he'd tell his parents back in Brazil that he was suddenly an engineer without giving them a heart attack but that was "one of those good problems you have in life".
"It was late at night I was calling them and it was all smiles and tears of joy."
He says his elderly great uncle Luiz was and is a great inspiration for a later-in-life career change.
A long-term companies administrator, Luiz had always wanted to be a lawyer and started studying to be one at the age of 70, graduating at 75.
"He's living proof today – at 81 years old as a lawyer – that it's never too late.
"If you are curious enough, if you are persistent, go after it, whatever is your dream."
Thiago Canestraro is among many New Zealanders now training in digital technology after an estimated 4000-person shortfall in that industry was identified by the Ministry of Business and Employment.
